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Gentili’s academic career in England began on 24 October 1580, when Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and Chancellor at Oxford, wrote to the Convocation of the University introducing ‘Albertus Gentilis an Italian borne ... a Dr of the Civile lawes’, asking for him to be given particular consideration and to ‘shewe him favore and curtesye’, ‘because he is a stranger and learned and an exile for religion’.2 In 1579 Gentilihad le Italy with his father Matteo and his brother Scipione to escape the Inquisition, arriving in London in August 1580.3 On 14 January 1581, the Convocation accepted Leicester’s request and on 6 March of the same year Gentili was received as a member of the university.4 At the same time, Gentili established a strong personal and intellectual relationship with Hakluyt in Oxford, who in July 1581 referred to the Italian jurist as ‘Gentilis noster’ in a letter to the French Huguenot Jean Hotman.5 As David and Alison Quinn have observed, Gentili was an active member of Hakluyt’s circle at Oxford, who, together with other Italian Protestant exiles, had a decisive role in the transmission of Italian Renaissance culture to early modern England.6 Also associated with Hakluyt were Horatio Palavicino, the Genoese merchant and diplomat, John Florio, the translator of Michel de Montaigne’s Essais who started his career translating Jacques Cartier’s travel accounts,7 and Gentili’s brother Scipione, a learned humanist and jurist, later professor of law at several universities in Germany. Hakluyt was also probably connected with Giacomo Castelvetro, publisher, translator, and, from 1592, Italian tutor to James VI of Scotland, who edited several works on geographical discoveries, such as Giulio Cesare Stella’s Columbeidos and Juan Gonzalez de Mendoza’s Historia della China, published in London in 1587 and immediately translated into English by Richard Parke at Hakluyt’s suggestion in 1588.8Gentili’s contribution to the spread of Italian Renaissance culture in England is shown by the inclusion of his verses in the opening of Florio’s Anglo-Italian dictionary, Queen Anna’s New World of Words, published in London in 1611.9 Moreover, in the 1580s Gentili supported the reprinting of several works by Machiavelli, published inanks to his intellectual skills and to his connections with Leicester’s circle, Gentili soon became a prominent gure at Oxford and an advisor to the English government on foreign policy and international law. In January 1584, together with Hotman, he was consulted by the English court about the controversy concerning the Spanish Ambassador Bernardino de Mendoza’s involvement in the rockmorton conspiracy, and the issue of whether he should be forced to leave England and relocate to Paris. Gentili’s opinion was crucial in the decision that led to Mendoza’s eventual expulsion. In fact, Gentili was a strong supporter of the immunity guaranteed to diplomats by the law of nations: he observes in his De legationibus, published in London in 1585 and dedicated to Philip Sidney, ‘in dealing with an ambassador who is a spy I do not believe that severity can be carried beyond the point of refusing to admit him or expelling him’.13 At the same time, however, he reminded his readers of an ambassador’s duty to disobey his prince if his orders were unjust. Passive obedience to one’s superiors was never a virtue, especially for the ‘perfect ambassador’.14 Gentili’s De legationibus, republished in Hanau in 1594, 1596, and 1607, soon became indispensable reading for anyone interested in the relationship between diplomacy and politics in England. In 1588, even John Case, the leading gure of Oxford Aristotelianism, who was unlikely to share Gentili’s admiration for Machiavelli, praised ‘Albericus Gentilis, civilis scientiae doctor’, encouraging readers to consult his treatise on embassies carefully.15 |
